Five for Fighting 9/8/07

Two US senators say the Trump administration is breaking the law by withholding the FISA court decision while it presses Congress to renew America’s most sweeping surveillance program.

The US government’s Tradewinds initiative has made it easier to throw millions of dollars at “nontraditional” defense contractors, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

The PHP Foundation has revealed two serious vulnerabilities that could impact millions of websites. Security experts warn that failure to quickly patch the flaws could have dire consequences.

From the Senate to governors’ mansions, candidates are trying to outcompete each other to be the most anti–data center in races across the US.

This week on Uncanny Valley, we also discuss Anthropic’s IPO filing and the volunteers gearing up to counter ICE at the midterms.

Five hauntings from the other side of technology.

The French AI lab claims its latest release matches or outperforms even the best models from DeepSeek and Z.ai in coding and cybersecurity.

Security researchers used AI tools to help uncover years-old vulnerabilities in the PHP web scripting language. Then the AI-assisted attacks began.

“There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused this system more than Microsoft,” Vice President JD Vance said on Thursday.

In a world of AI Overviews, Wikipedia usage declines. But the real loss may be far more existential than website traffic.

Amazon Web Services logged attempts to leverage the internet-melting PHP2Shell bugs four days ago. They’re now being “broadly exploited” across the internet.

As the White House contemplates losing Congress, there has been an unusually early effort to find a Republican scapegoat.